Before life got complicated

I remember pretending to be on Charlie’s Angels when I was little, running around the house with my hand held in the shape of a gun searching for bad guys. I don’t remember which character I was, probably Jaclyn Smith’s Kelly because I’m a brunette. My cousin Stephanie was probably Jill since that is her middle name, and maybe our cousin Nichelle was Sabrina because she is a brunette, too. Or maybe I was Sabrina and Nichelle was Kelly … she is prettier than me anyway. 😉

Today, Farrah Fawcett, who played Jill and was loved by millions of girls for a her fabulous feathered hair and by millions of boys because of her sexy swimsuit poster, died from cancer. And she was brave through it all.

A lot of people didn’t take Farrah seriously as an actor until “The Burning Bed,” but she went on to do something more important than be on a movie screen. She shared her struggles with the disease in the hope that someone would be inspired to fight harder, to get tested or to take better care of themselves.

Goodbye, Farrah. You’ll always be part of my childhood.

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The world also lost another pop culture icon today: Michael Jackson, the King of Pop. For me it was the boy and the music.

His songs were part of growing up, too, so his death is bittersweet. Most of us are mourning the loss of a bit of our childhood rather than what he became.

Songs like I Want You Back and Beat It and Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’ are classics. You can’t deny what he did for music – it’s just terrible how his life changed. I think fame messed him up. I think about his children and wonder how they will cope and who will help them.

I remember when my brother got the Thriller album; we were so pumped. We played that record, and I do mean record, over and over and over. And my brother could bust a move. We all learned to do the moonwalk on my parents’ hardwood floors, in our socks. Then we progressed to wearing shoes. Some of us even tried it on roller skates with varying degrees of success.

And what cheerleading squad in the ’80s didn’t have a routine to Beat It? Even though I wasn’t a cheerleader, I knew the moves and thought I was something with my tape recorder out in the backyard, jamming to MJ.

So even though the grownup Michael Jackson wasn’t someone I liked very much, the boy and his music will always be a little bit special.